Burchfield by Ian Battenfield Headley

This work harkens to the spirit of the musique concrète composers, particularly that of Luc Ferrari, who utilized recorded sound as the musical material for a work, instead of as just a medium through which music can be distributed. In composing, I limiting my manipulation of the source material to what would have been available to the concrète composers, techniques such as: panning, splicing, layering to form textures, crossfading, and playback speed manipulation.
The triviality of these processes using digital editors enabled me to fluidly work with my source material. Form and motivic gestures evolved from the physics of the source material.
This direct interplay with the world of organic sound is what the concrete composers were after in their music, to shape the sound of the natural world into a kind of 'natural' artifact. In this way, a piece might grow directly from a natural sound source, and in its form seem as if the sound was 'expressing itself'.

Ian Battenfield Headley is a NYC-based composer. His music has been described as, exploring the, ”Beautiful dichotomies between organic recordings and processed sounds,” (Weird Ear Records), and “...strikingly visceral, three-dimensional...” (New Music Box).

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